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T O P I C R E V I E W

Robert Pearlman

NASA update

Crew Readies for Thursday Spacewalk, Discusses Twitter

The International Space Station crew members had a light workday Wednesday then adjusted their sleep schedule for an early wakeup to begin work on the only scheduled spacewalk of the Expedition 22 mission.

Flight Engineers Maxim Suraev and Oleg Kotov will exit the station around 4:10 a.m. CST Thursday, Jan. 14 to ready the Mini-Research Module 2, known as Poisk, for future Russian vehicle dockings. NASA TV will begin coverage of the spacewalk at 3:30 a.m. CST.

Credit: NASA TV

The excursion marks the third spacewalk for Kotov, who made two spacewalks in 2007 totaling 11 hours and two minutes as an Expedition 15 flight engineer, and the first for Suraev.

Suraev and Commander Jeff Williams will be the first to use the new docking port when they relocate their Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft from the aft port of the Zvezda service module on Jan. 21.

Before adhering to their early sleep schedule, Williams and Flight Engineers T.J. Creamer and Soichi Noguchi discussed "tweeting" from orbit, the value of Twitter in engaging the public from space and the upcoming advent of Internet access on the station.

The two cosmonauts prepared the Mini-Research Module 2, known as Poisk, for future Russian dockings. Suraev and commander Jeff Williams will be the first to use the new port when they relocate their Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft from the aft port of the Zvezda service module on Jan. 21.

Credit: NASA TV

This was the third spacewalk for Kotov, who made two spacewalks in 2007 as an Expedition 15 flight engineer, and the first for Suraev.

Credit: NASA TV

Robert Pearlman

NASA update

Crew Completes Soyuz Relocation

Two members of the Expedition 22 crew successfully delivered the Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft to its new location Thursday morning.

Soyuz commander and flight engineer Maxim Suraev undocked the spacecraft from the aft port of the Zvezda service module at 4:03 a.m. CST and docked it to the Poisk module at 4:24 a.m., marking the first docking to the new module. Expedition 22 commander Jeff Williams accompanied Suraev.

Credit: NASA TV

While Suraev and Williams conducted the brief flyover to Poisk, flight engineers Oleg Kotov, TJ Creamer and Soichi Noguchi looked on from inside the orbital outpost and captured the activity through photo-documentation.

Robert Pearlman

Space Station Reboost

Astronaut Jeff Williams demonstrates the acceleration experienced inside the cabin during a planned International Space Station reboost on January 24, 2010. The ISS is reboosted periodically to maintain its orbit, and to prepare for visiting spacecraft, such as the space shuttle and Progress vehicles.

Credit: NASA TV

Robert Pearlman

Expedition 22/23 Change of Command

In a ceremony held 220 miles above the Earth, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams handed over command of the International Space Station to Expedition 23 commander, cosmonaut Oleg Kotov. Williams had been commander of Expedition 22, overseeing completion of the United States' segment of the orbiting complex. Williams and Flight Engineer Max Suraev are slated to land aboard Soyuz TMA-17 in Kazakhstan March 18.

Credit: NASA TV

Robert Pearlman

NASA release

ISS Photography: 100 Million Words

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the Expedition 22 crew aboard the International Space Station is about to complete the generation of 100 million words worth of information.

That’s because Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineers Max Suraev, Oleg Kotov, T.J. Creamer, and Soichi Noguchi are expected to snap a total of 100,000 images by the end of their mission in Earth orbit.

Williams is setting a record that surpasses his own previous record of 83,856 images taken during Expedition 13 in 2006.

“This week we broke my old Exp. 13 record for number of Earth photos,” Williams “tweeted” from the station. “Later, after landing and recovery, I will post some of best.”

Among those digital still images is this spectacular nighttime image taken of Houston, Texas, the home of Mission Control and astronaut training, and the hub of the International Space Station Program that unites five space agencies and 15 countries in peaceful exploration and scientific research.

Williams and Suraev will end their five-and-a-half-month stay on the station Thursday, when they undock their Soyuz spacecraft and head for a landing in Kazakhstan. They were part of both the Expedition 21 and 22 crews. Kotov, Creamer and Noguchi will stay on orbit, snapping more photos, for two more months before returning home after being part of both the Expedition 22 and 23 crews.

All told, space station crews so far have amassed a total of almost 639,000 images. Those images include photos that document life and work aboard the space station, and photos that document the condition of the home planet from its unique perspective 220 miles above Earth. Their efforts are part of a larger collection that began with Earth observations photos during the Gemini Program of the 1960s. Many of the images are used in scientific research about the Earth, its climate, its resources and the effects humans are having on both.

The recent STS-130 space shuttle mission delivered a new observation deck known as the cupola that offers the largest window ever flown on a spacecraft, and the upcoming STS-131 shuttle mission to the station will deliver the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF), which will provide a new facility dedicated to multi- and hyper-spectral remote sensing and high resolution Earth observation photography to enhance the use of the best optical-quality window ever flown in space, in the U.S. Destiny Laboratory.